The peaceful coffee shops of Samcheong-dong have some of the prettiest views of old Korean hanok homes.
SM Entertainment’s headquarters in Cheongdam-dong is getting a giant facelift.
South of the mighty Han River is where Seoul gets much more posh. Thanks to Psy, everyone now has heard of Gangnam. Gangnam may just literally mean “south of the river,” but for Koreans it conjures up all sorts of ideas of modern living and luxury. A brief scene from The Bourne Legacy was even filmed on a back street here. But the area around Gangnam subway station is much more businesslike these days. It is the home of Samsung’s massive headquarters and is a major hub for financial and tech companies.
Garosu-gil has become one of the most popular places in Seoul to rest and relax.
It’s also full of shopping.
For fashion, style and coolness, you need to travel closer to the Han River, to the uber trendy Apgujeong or, to be more specific, the neighborhoods of Sinsa, Apgujeong and Cheongdam. One of the coolest strips in today’s Korea is Garosu-gil, literally “tree-lined street,” a narrow kilometer-long road that cuts through Sinsa, which is full of art galleries, shops, huge coffee houses and restaurants. It’s a relatively quiet street for such a popular place in such a big city.
This is also home to one of Se7en’s spicy chicken stew restaurants, Yeolbong Jjimdak, featuring plenty of pictures of the singer and his friends. Yeolbong Jjimdak is located on the south side of Garosu-gil, just off the main road.
Further up the road is the flagship location of Helianthus, one of Korea’s most luxurious handbag brands. And if fancy handbags are your thing, you can check out the Simone Handbag Museum while in Garosu-gil, a ten-story building that’s built in the shape of a handbag.
Just down the street from Garosu-gil, in the heart of the Apgujeong area, is Dosan Park, home to some of the fanciest shops in Korea. How fancy is it? Well, there’s a huge Maison Hermes here, just the fourth in the world, a gorgeous glass-walled building that seriously impresses. It’s also the home of actor Bae Yong-joon’s Gorilla in the Kitchen restaurant, a healthy themed restaurant that uses no oil or creams. There’s also an extremely funky Ann Demeulemeester shop that’s completely covered in greenery; the building was designed by Mass Studies, one of Korea’s most creative architecture firms. The luxury lifestyle brand Man Made WooYoungMi is also located in Apgujeong, along with many other super fancy shops.
After Apgujeong comes the Cheongdam-dong district, which is even posher. This area is the home to many music labels, including SM Entertainment, JYP Entertainment and Cube Entertainment.
The Galleria department store in Apgujeong has long been one of the fanciest places to shop in Seoul.
Across the street from SM Entertainment is Korea’s very own 10 Corso Como, and in the alley behind SM is Jung Saem Mool, one of Korea’s best beauty salons. Jung Saem Mool is very pricey, but its hair and makeup artists regularly work with many of Korea’s top stars. For a more artsy shopping experience, you can try Daily Projects, which features plenty of books on design and art in a great space.
The sidewalks outside of all three major music labels are popular places for fans to camp out, hoping to catch a glimpse of their favorite stars, but the area around JYP Entertainment is especially popular. Located in a small alley off the main road, with Cube Entertainment just a few meters away (and, best of all, a donut shop across the street, to help you kill time), this unassuming strip can get especially full in good weather.
Incidentally, if you are looking to pick up the latest K-pop gear, Cube has a Cube café full of shirts, CDs and other goods, while across town at the famous Lotte Department Store, SM Entertainment has been opening a temporary “pop-up” shop during the big tourism seasons in January and the summer where you can pick up goods by your favorite bands.
For all my talk of fancy shops and upscale brands, even the poshest parts of Seoul can be surprisingly mixed, broken up by old Internet cafés or donut shops. That’s always been a defining part of Korea, the mix—combining new and old, fancy and simple, loud and quiet, cutting edge and retro. Koreans call it jjamppong, “all mixed up.” Usually used to refer to a spicy seafood soup, jjamppong has long seemed like the most Korean of words to me.
Despite Korea’s unceasing push toward the future, there are still hints and tastes of its cool past that linger. A palace here. An old neighborhood there. Korea and Seoul have reinvented themselves so many times already over the past few decades, and those reinventions lay beside each other, overlapping and layering, creating the country it is today. It’s hard to imagine, but for most of Seoul’s history it existed only on the north side of the Han River. Today, it sprawls in all directions, forever growing higher, faster, flashier. And it is that mix of elements that has also created K-pop.
The Wonder Girls’ biggest hit, “Nobody,” featured a retro 1960s style.
If Korean music fans’ biggest question was when would K-pop break out in the West, in the West the biggest question has probably been “So what is K-pop anyway?” K-pop literally means “Korean pop,” as in pop music, but of course the term stands for much more than that.
At first glance, the beats and dancing and videos look familiar, much like a variation of American pop music. But the closer you look and the more you listen, the more differences you notice. Like when I heard a K-pop song in a Barcelona café, I could identify something different about it even before I heard the singers’ language. There is something distinct and special about K-pop. It’s like everything is a little bit louder, the images brighter, the style flashier—it’s just more.
Ever since the modern pop music industry began a century ago, it has been international, from the jazz of the 1920s to the rise of rock ’n roll to disco to the hundreds of types of music we have today. Much of the time, that has meant musical ideas arising in the United States and traveling to the world—but not always. The British Invasion, which brought the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to the United States, is probably the most famous example. Bossa nova, Brazil’s samba-influenced jazz that became very popular in the 1950s and 1960s, is a favorite of mine. Scandinavia has its heavy metal. And, today, Korea has K-pop.
So where did K-pop come from? Although the hip, exciting Seoul of today is rather new, it’s worth remembering that Koreans have long been a very musical people. Chinese diplomats returning home hundreds of years ago commented on how much Koreans love to sing. Even Korean traditional music was unique in East Asia for its focus on free-form, almost jazz-like improvisation and reinterpretation. Western music came to Korea in the late nineteenth century, bringing new scales and instruments, and jazz was quite popular in the 1920s.
In the aftermath of the Korean War of 1950–3, both sides of the divided peninsula were devastated, but soon Korea’s strong-willed, dynamic people began rebuilding their country. By the 1960s, South Korea was undergoing an artistic renaissance, and one of the most exciting aspects of that era was its music. Rock, folk and funk all flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s as young people became caught up in the excitement of an all-new era. Sadly, though, this era would not last. South Korea’s government was quite authoritarian at the time and none too fond of the counter-culture elements of the day, so it cracked down hard in 1975. Many of Korea’s top musicians